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Valerie Strauss: Democrats Paved the Way for Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2017 //
41

 

 

Valerie Strauss wrote an excellent article about the hypocrisy of Democrats who now loudly oppose Billionaire Betsy DeVos, but spent the last eight years bashing teachers, unions, and public schools while pouring billions of dollars into the proliferation of privately-managed charter schools. Once Democrats became cheerleaders for school choice, they abandoned the principle that public schools under democratic control are a fundamental public responsibility.

 

I urge you to read this article, which recounts the perfidy of Democrats who fell for privatization and betrayed public education. In many cases, support for charter schools opened the door to billionaires and hedge funder donations, to groups like Democrats for Education Reform and Education Reform Now and Families for Excellent Schools. Think Corey Booker, Andrew Cuomo, Dannell Malloy. Think of the silence of the Democrats as the U.S. Department of Education spent more than $3 billion on charter schools. How do they now express opposition to DeVos’s love for charters (and vouchers). She has exposed their hypocrisy.

 

Both of my last two books are about this theme–how the Democrats embraced privatization and opened the door to vouchers.

 

So I have to add a couple of points to her accurate summary:

 

In March 2011, President Obama and Secretary Duncan were in Miami with Jeb Bush to celebrate the “turnaround” of Miami Central High School. At the same time, thousands of working people were protesting the anti-labor policies of Scott Walker in Madison. Neither Obama nor Duncan ever showed up in Madison to show support for the teachers and union members who support Democrats.

 

The other point that needs to be added is that a month after Obama, Arne, and Jeb met to toast the turnaround of Miami Central, the state education Department in Florida listed it as a “failing” school that should be closed. I reported this in “Reign of Error.” The press never did report it. Why were Obama and Arne burnishing Jeb’s “credentials” as a “reformer?” Paving the way for Jeb’s good friend Betsy DeVos.

 

Let’s see if Democrats rediscover the importance of public education, where all kids are welcome, no lottery, no exclusion of kids with disabilities. In public schools, not every child can get admission to every school, but every child must be served and enrolled. Not some, but all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

have to add

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

A Century of Skills Movements

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
30

I wrote about this topic in 2010. Year after year, decade after decade, some educational “authority” tells us that the world is changing fast, and that the schools must teach useful skills, not academic knowledge. The article appeared in the AFT’s American Educator magazine in spring 2010.

 

If I were to rewrite the article today, I would add the Common Core to the list, because it is a collection of skills without content. Because it is mandated in so many states and tied to high-stakes tests, subjects like history, civics, and science get short shrift. Even literature gets short shrift, because students are taught to read short passages without context. Teachers have reported that they no longer teach novels or poetry, to meet the demands of the Common Core for close reading.

 

If I were to revise the article, I would change its tone to acknowledge the value of the “maker-movement.” This is a deservedly popular activity in which children make things with their hands, some involving electronics, some using tools or fabric or paper or wood. Genuine progressive education recognizes the value of loving literature, delving into history in depth, and using your hands and mind to make beautiful things.

 

Here is the 2010 article:

 

I am a historian of education and have written often about the educational enthusiasms and fads of the past century. One of my books, titled Left Back, tells the story of the rise and fall of one fad after another across the 20th century. In brief, what I’ve found is that in the land of American pedagogy, innovation is frequently confused with progress, and whatever is thought to be new is always embraced more readily than what is known to be true. Thus, pedagogues, policymakers, thought leaders, facilitators, and elected of cials are rushing to get aboard the 21st-century-skills express train, lest they appear to be old-fashioned or traditional, these terms being the worst sort of opprobrium that can be hurled at any educator.

 

What these train riders don’t seem to realize is that there is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st-century-skills movement. The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues throughout the 20th century. Their call for 20th-cen- tury skills sounds identical to the current effort to promote 21st-century skills. If there was one cause that animated the schools of education in the 20th century, it was the search for the ultimate breakthrough that would nally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content.

 

For decade after decade, pedagogical leaders called upon the schools to free themselves from tradition and subject matter. Ellwood P. Cubberley, while dean of the education school at Stanford, warned that it was dangerous for society to educate boys—and even girls—without reference to vocational ends. Whatever they learned, he insisted, should be relevant to their future lives and work. He thought it foolish to saturate them with “a mass of knowledge that can have little application for the lives which most of them must inevitably lead.” They were sure to become disappointed and discontented, and who knew where all this discontent might lead? Cubberley called on his fellow educators to abandon their antiquated academic ideals and instead to adapt education to the real life and real needs of their students. This was in 1911.

 

The federal government issued a major report on the education of black students in 1916. Its author, Thomas Jesse Jones, scoffed at academic education, which lacked relevance to the lives of these students and was certainly not adapted to their needs. Jones wanted black children to “learn to do by doing,” which was considered to be the modern, scienti c approach to education. It was not knowledge of the printed page that black students needed, wrote Jones, but “knowledge of gardening, small farming, and the simple industries required in farming communities.” Jones admired schools that were teaching black students how to sew, cook, garden, milk cows, lay bricks, harvest crops, and raise poultry. This was a prescription for locking the South’s African American population into menial roles for the foreseeable future. As Jones acknowledged in his report, the parents of black children wanted them to have an academic education, but he thought he knew better. His clarion call was sounded with extremely poor timing—just as America was changing from a rural to an urban nation.

 

Although there were many similar efforts to eliminate the academic curricu- lum and replace it with real-world interactions, none came as close to the ideals of 21st-century learning skills as William Heard Kilpatrick’s celebrated Project Method. Kilpatrick, a fabled Teachers College professor, took the education world by storm in 1918 with his proposal for the Project Method. Instead of a sequential curriculum laid out in advance,

 

Kilpatrick urged that boys and girls engage in hands-on projects of their own choosing. As Kilpatrick envisioned it, the project was “whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment.” Kilpatrick said that the project shaped character and personality. It required activity, not docility. It awakened student motivation. Ideally, the project would be done collaboratively by a group.

 

Another forerunner to the 21st-century-skills movement was the activity movement of the 1920s and 1930s. As in the Project Method, students were encouraged to engage in activities and projects built on their interests. Studies were interdisciplinary, and academic subjects were called upon only when needed to solve a problem. Students built, measured, and gured things out, while solving real-life problems like how to build a playhouse or a pet park or a puppet theater. Decision making, critical thinking, cooperative group learning: all were integral parts of the activity movement.

 

Something similar happened in many high schools in the 1930s, where many avant-garde school districts replaced courses like science and history with interdisciplinary courses, which they called the “core curriculum” or “social living.” Some districts merged several disciplines— such as English, social studies, and science— into a single course, which was focused not on subject matter but on students’ life experiences. In a typical class, students studied their own homes, made maps and scale drawings, and analyzed such questions as the cost of maintaining the home; the cost of fuel, light, and power; and how to prepare nutritious meals.

 

But there were occasional parent protests. In Roslyn, New York, parents were incensed because their children couldn’t read but spent an entire day baking nut bread. The Roslyn superintendent assured them that baking nut bread was an excellent way to learn mathematics.

 

In the 1950s came the Life Adjustment Movement, yet another stab at getting rid of subject matter and teaching students to prepare for real life. And in the 1980s, there was Outcome-Based Education, which sought to make schooling relevant, hands-on, and attuned to the alleged real interests and needs of young people.

 

The early 1990s brought SCANS—the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills—which recommended exactly the kinds of functional skills that are now called 21st-century skills. These documents were produced by a commis- sion for the U.S. Secretary of Labor. I recall hearing the director of SCANS say that students didn’t need to know anything about the Civil War or how to write a book report; these were obsolete kinds of knowledge and skills.
When the SCANS recommendations appeared in 1991, I was an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and I discussed them with David Kearns, the deputy secretary who had been CEO of Xerox. I said, “David, the SCANS report says that young people don’t need to know how to write a book report, they need to know how to write advertising jingles.” He replied, “That’s ridiculous. You can’t write advertising jingles if you don’t know how to write a book report.”

 

Each of these initiatives had an impact. They left American education with a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter. “It’s academic” came to mean “it’s purely theoretical and unreal.” For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.

 

One of the problems with skills-driven approaches to learning is that there are so many things we need to know that cannot be learned through hands-on experiences. The educated person learns not only from his or her own experience, but from the hard- earned experience of others. We do not restart the world anew in each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to see beyond our own immediate experience. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the learned capacity to understand the lessons of history, to engage in the adventures of literature, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them. Through literature, for example, we have the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of other people, to walk in their shoes, to experience life as it was lived in another century and another culture, to live vicariously beyond the bounds of our own time and family and place. What a gift! How sad to refuse it. ☐

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Mercedes Schneider: Whatever Happened to the Authors of the Common Core?

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2017 //
18

Mercedes Schneider wrote a book about the origins of the Common Core and probably knows more about it than almost anyone but David Coleman, its celebrated architect.

 

In this post, she reports on her search for Coleman’s group called Student Achievement Partners, which won millions to write the standards.

 

Coleman has gone on to lead the College Board, which is now embroiled in controversy because of Coleman’s effort to redesign the SAT. He is paid $750,000. A good gig.

 

Schneider will watch to see what happens to CCSS, PARCC, SBAC, and the rest of it in the Trump era. Trump made many pledges to get rid of the Common Core: “Believe me!” He said. And he appointed a Common Core adherent to run the US Department of Ed.

 

Categories Common Core

Common Core Advocate May Be DeVos’ Deputy

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2017 //
26

According to the Trump group’s favorite news media, businessman Allen B. Hubbard is the likely choice for the #2 job in the U.S. Department of Education. He is a strong advocate for school choice and for the Common Core.

 

He is on the board of the Lumina Foundation, which has made large grants to support implementation of Common Core.

 

Like DeVos, he is very wealthy.

 

So pmuch for Trump’s vow to eliminate Common Core.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Arne’s Education Ideas Are Now on the Ash Heap of History

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2017 //
49

Peter Greene reviews Arne Duncan’s bold effort to declare American public education a failure, to impose high-stakes testing on teachers everywhere, and to develop a test-based system of evaluation for teachers, students, administrators, and schools, all tied to national standards (the Common Core). In pursuit of his fancy, Duncan caused damage to real people: thousands of schools were called “failures,” thousands of teachers’ lives were ruined.

 

If you read my book “Reign of Error,” you will learn that reformers spun a Big Lie about “failing schools,” as an excuse for privatizing as many as they could. They pointed to an achievement gap between different groups and blamed it on schools and teachers, without bothering to demonstrate that their preferred alternative–charter schools–would have any effect on reducing those gaps.

 

In reviewing Duncan’s disappearing “legacy,” Greene offers a few words of consolation:

 

At this point I can feel a little bad for Duncan—he didn’t really accomplish any of his major goals, and the next administration is not even going to pay lip service to his efforts. It must be tough to feel like you really know a lot about how something works, but the people in power won’t even listen to you. It feels, in fact, a lot like being a teacher during Duncan’s tenure at the U.S. Department of Education.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Obama’s Top 50 Accomplishents Do Not Include Education

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2017 //
43

Compared to Trump, Obama is a portrait of dignity, reason, and intellect.  The Washington Monthly published a list of his top 50 accomplishments. Note that there is no mention of K-12 education. As readers of this blog  know, Obama’s education policies were a continuation of the George W. Bush policies of measure-and-punish. Arne Duncan did whatever Gates and Broad wanted. He advanced privatization by his constant promotion of charter schools and his refusal to demand accountability for them.  He demoralized teachers by insisting that they be evaluated by test scores of their students. He trumpeted the lie that our public schools are failing. He was an agent of the right wingers who want to replace public education with an array of bad choices. When unions were under attack in Wisconsin and in the courts, the Obama administration was not there. It collaborated in the destruction of the Democratic base.

 

This is too was Obama’s legacy: the assault on public schools, teachers, and unions.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Obama, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Peter Greene: How Donald Trump Betrayed Conservatives by Picking DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2017 //
14

Peter Greene writes that many conservative parents realize that Trump hoaxed them. He pandered to them by denouncing Common Core, but once he was elected, he picked a woman who was a strong supporter of Common Core. DeVos served on Jeb Bush’s board (Foundation for Educational Excellence), which advocated for school choice, technology, digital learning, and Common Core.

 

Trump won the Electoral College, but Jeb Bush won the U.S. Department of Education.

 

A conservative critic of Common Core quoted Betsy DeVos saying:

 

I do support high standards, strong accountability, and local control. When Governors such as John Engler, Mike Huckabee, and Mike Pence were driving the conversation on voluntary high standards driven by local voices, it all made sense.

 

The critic observed:

 

The first sentence contains the insidious, using-buzzwords-to-make-sure-I-get-everyone-from-every-ed-camp-into-mine, rhetorical nonsense. You simply can’t have “high standards” and “strong accountability” at the federal level and get LOCAL CONTROL. You just can’t. That sentence alone should be deadly in the confirmation hearings for Mrs. DeVos.

 

Greene concludes:

 

Bottom line: Senators should be hearing objections to DeVos from across the perspective, and when you are calling your senator (there is no if– you should be doing it, and soon, and often), you can take into account what sort of Senator you are calling. Your GOP senator needs to hear that DeVos’s nomination breaks Trump’s promise to attack Common Core and to get local control back to school districts. Your GOP senator needs to hear that you are not fooled by DeVos’s attempt to pretend she’s not a long-time Common Core supporter.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Common Core, Education Industry, Privatization

Questions for Billionaire Betsy DeVos on Her Confirmation Hearings on January 11

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2017 //
60

Senate committee hearings on the nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education are scheduled for January 11 in the Dirksen Office Building.

 

She has made campaign contributions to four members of the committee that will interview her, so it is likely that her approval is a foregone conclusion.

 

However, members of the committee of both parties should be prepared with good questions to draw out her experience, her background, her ideology, and her views.

 

Here are a few for members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to consider:

 

  1. Do you intend to pay the state of Ohio the $5.2 million that you owe for campaign finance violations?
  2. Are you aware of the widespread fraud and profiteering in the charter industry in Michigan?
  3. If you are Secretary of Education, what would you do to reduce fraud, waste and abuse in the charter industry?
  4. Why do you support cybercharters when research consistently shows that they deliver a substandard education, with low tests scores, high attrition, and low graduation rates?
  5. Why do you oppose regulation and oversight of charter schools?
  6. Do you believe that students who use public funds to go to religious schools should be subject to the same standards and tests as students  in public schools?
  7. Do you think that Thomas Jefferson was wrong when he recommended a separation of church and state?
  8. Should religious schools that accept public funding be required to hire certified teachers? If not, why not?
  9. Do you think that Detroit is a good model for the rest of the nation? It has more children in charter schools than public schools, and charter schools do not get better performance than public schools.
  10. Do you think that Milwaukee is a good model for the rest of the nation? It has vouchers, charter schools, and traditional public schools, yet is one of the lowest performing urban districts, only slightly ahead of Detroit, which is at the very bottom on NAEP.
  11. Do you know what NAEP is?
  12. What programs of the U.S. Department of Education are you planning to change?
  13. What is your knowledge of federal funding for higher education? How would you change it?
  14. What do you know about federal funding of students with special needs? How would you change it?
  15. About 85% of American students attend traditional public schools. Other than urging them to go to nonpublic schools, what ideas do you have to improve their schools?

 

Please suggest your questions.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Corporate Reformers Will Meet in Atlanta to Promote Privatization

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2016 //
13

Thanks to friends in Georgia who sent me the alert about a meeting planned in Atlanta for January 11-12, 2017.

 

It is billed as planning for the future for a radical transformation of Georgia education. Georgia voters just voted overwhelmingly to block the governor from taking control of their public schools and giving them to charter operators.

 

Nonetheless, consider the 2016 sponsors of this “radical” transformation:

 

The Walton Family Foundation

American Federation for Children (Betsy and Dick DeVos)

StudentsFirst

Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence

 

The corporate reformers never give up. No matter how many times the voters say no, they come back for more.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Steven Singer: Don’t Be Fooled! Betsy DeVos Loves Common Core!

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2016 //
18

Steven Singer wants you to know the truth: No matter how much she denies it, Betsy DeVos really really loves Common Core!

 

He has the evidence to prove it.

 

She’s a board member of Jeb Bush’s pro-Common Core think tank, Foundation for Excellence in Education, where she hangs out with prominent Democratic education reformers like Bill Gates and Eli Broad. But she says that somehow doesn’t mean she likes it.

 

She founded, funds and serves on the board of the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), an organization dedicated to the implementation and maintenance of Common Core. But somehow that doesn’t mean she’s for the standards.

 

She’s even spent millions lobbying politicians in her home state of Michigan asking them NOT to repeal Common Core. But somehow that doesn’t mean she’s in favor of it.

 

It must be a hard position to be in.

 

Her entire nomination for Trump’s cabinet is contingent on convincing the public that she hates this thing that he explicitly campaigned against but she favored.

 

Rarely has an education policy been such a political hot potato as Common Core. Typically Republicans hate it and Democrats love it. However, little of this has to with its actual merits – or lack thereof.

 

Common Core is a set of academic standards saying what students should know in each grade. Nonetheless, these standards are deeply unpopular with teachers, students, parents and the general public. Part of this stems from the undemocratic way state legislatures were bribed to enact them by the Obama administration in many cases before they were even done being written and often circumventing the voting process altogether. Other criticisms come from the way the standards were devised almost entirely by standardized test corporations without input from experts in the field like child psychologists and classroom teachers. Finally, the standards get condemnation for what they do to actual classrooms – narrowing the curriculum, promoting excessive test prep, increased paperwork, the purchase of new text and work books and requiring new and more unfair standardized assessments.

 

As a Republican, DeVos must do everything she can to distance herself from this policy.

 

It’s just that her history of advocating for it gets in the way.

 

Every statement that Singer makes is documented in links. And the story is longer than what is quoted here. Open and see his stunning graphics and read the rest of the post.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Common Core, Education Reform
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